A autobiografia americana como testemunho e caução de cidadania

• Autor(a) principal: Alves, Teresa F. A.
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/gaudiumsciendi.2022.12945

This essay focus on the alignment of autobiography with American citizenship, a subject that suits a piece written in homage to Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires who heartily dealt with American culture in many of her essayistic works and teachings. The interweaving of literary autobiography with the question of citizenship is discussed by accessing texts authored by men and women writers from several cultural denominations in USA, namely those from the dominant culture as well as those from other-cultures which thrive within it and with it describe a temporal arch suitable to the flourishing of a literary modulation that apparently emulates the 1776 Declaration of Independence by upholding the inalienable rights of the individual in face of a new political identity.The analysis of texts by Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Harriet A. Jacobs, Gertrude Bonin/ Zitkala-Sa and Mary Antin, focus on the singular and unique entwining of each of the lives under scrutiny with his/her social and political circumstances. Further, the impact of those lives on the above-mentioned circumstances is emphasized, as well as their contribute to the formulation of the concept of the American representative man or representative woman, as well as to the successive redefinition of such a concept.